Q&A: Yavuz Baydar on Turkey's press freedom climate

For the past several months, CPJ staff has been researching
pervasive press freedom problems in Turkey, including the criminal prosecution
of journalists, the use of governmental pressure to engender self-censorship,
and the presence of a repressive legal structure. This month, CPJ will release
an in-depth report on Turkey's press freedom crisis. In advance of our report, we
are publishing this illuminating interview with Yavuz Baydar, ombudsman for the
Turkish newspaper Sabah and columnist
for Today's Zaman. The interview was
conducted via email.

Nina Ognianova: In recent
years, under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has been
one of the world's top jailers of journalists in various press freedom
rankings. Compared to pressures on journalists in Turkey's past, how does the
current wave of arrests and other forms of pressure on the media fare? Is this
an unprecedented crackdown?

Yavuz Baydar: First and foremost, this is not
unprecedented, and it is not a crackdown on Turkish media in general. Let me
explain.

Turkish media was not truly independent until the mid-1980s. The
worst was experienced in the early '70s and after the military coup in 1980,
during which newspapers were strictly subordinated to the emergency rule
commands and hundreds of journalists were in detention or frightened. So
although I would describe the current situation as utterly worrisome and fully
unacceptable, I would be cautious as not to overdramatize.

If there is a crackdown--and there is--it is much more about the
Kurdish colleagues, activist-publishers, and Kurdish publications. Out of
approximately 95 people whose cases constitute the base for domestic and
international attention, around 75 to 80 are Kurds. Most of their cases fall
under the category of crackdown, because Turkish authorities interpret the
problematic Anti-Terror Law to obstruct freedom of expression. The law in its
vagueness gives all the possibilities to arrest people with other accusations
than the practice of freedom of opinion and information, which makes it tough
for us all to distinguish whether or not accused people are militants or
journalists. This is, of course, all linked to the bleeding Kurdish issue and
PKK warfare in Turkey.

But regardless of all such, this makes the case of Turkey's
suppression of press freedom more of a case of freedom of expression--and almost
entirely a Kurdish one.

Then we have a group of people, accused of co-conspiring for a
coup with top officers and others against the elected government and
parliament. Mustafa Balbay, Tuncay Özkan, and others in the context of Odatv fall into this category. This
section is an entirely different category, where the accusations are so
substantiated that almost all the applications of the suspected colleagues,
claiming that they were indicted and jailed because they are journalists, were
rejected by ECHR [the European Court of Human Rights] in Strasbourg. Do I agree
with ECHR on this? Yes. Do I also agree with ECHR that they were held for far
too long in jail? Absolutely.

But coup is a very serious crime.

I think, therefore, that these people--a dozen or so--should be
tried while on free foot; there is far too strong evidence to keep the public
suspicions alive that their cases be dropped altogether. Crime is a crime: If
no colleagues of decency in Britain claim that their colleagues involved in
phone-hacking case not stand trial at all, so would we claim that they should
be given freedom until a fast and fair verdict.

NO: What has the effect of
the recent pressures on the media been on the press corps in Turkey? Is
coverage in Turkey chilled? Have journalists started to self-censor? Are there
any taboo topics that journalists and their editors/media owners are afraid to
touch?

YB: First, the Kurdish media feel enormous heat. They
have been operating under the Sword of Damocles. But despite hardships, they
continue to give voice to the debate. Their disturbing flaw being, of course,
too tied to the PKK and praising its violence and glorifying its illegal
existence. This will continue to cause problems.

Also, Turkish media's coverage of the Kurdish issue and PKK's
acts and role have been increasingly limited. Here I refer to the mass-circulation
dailies in the so-called "center," be it pro-government or not. (There are, of
course, others, such as daily Taraf, Yurt, Birgün, weekly Aksiyon,
and minors.) I refer also to the private news channels such as CNN Turk, NTV,
Bugün TV, TV24, and almost all others, which impose stiff editorial filtering.

It is all because of the media owners of these outlets acting as
"the coalition of the willing" that openly act submissively to the government
and security bureaucracy. I can only refer to a key meeting between the PM and
all the media proprietors last autumn, during which media owners went as far as
proposing themselves to the PM that they can build a "censor commission" among
themselves, to be chaired by a cabinet minister. The PM declined the offer, but
the message was taken well. In the case of Uludere, where 34 Kurdish smugglers
were bombed to death due to a tragic mistake, there was a full blackout in that
media for 17 hours while the news flow was instant and heavy in social media.
This pattern of blocking is now the norm.

NO: What has motivated the
government to go after journalists at this particular time? Why the mass
arrests now?

YB: As I explained, the main cause is the
bleeding Kurdish issue and terror. An overwhelming bulk of the detained are
Kurds.

There are no mass arrests of journalists; have not been. If we
speak about the KCK case (linked with PKK's local-regional networks), we may
use this term. Otherwise, it would be misleading.

NO: Some observers have
connected the recent crackdown on the press with the prime minister's
personality, which they have described as confrontational. What is your take on
that?

YB: One elderly colleague described the situation
as the "tall shadow of the Prime Minister over the media, growing ever taller"
type of metaphor, which explains it.

Yes, there is a character factor. Mr. Erdoğan has become
increasingly tense, uneasy, defensive, and downright furious with dissent and
criticism by the media and many columnists, also reporters. He has become
louder, and gone into an "angry teacher" mode, mocking the "pupils" and telling
them how to report or comment. This has led, he discovered, to his increased
popularity in a country where the media have always ranked low due to past
sins.

But "heavy presence" is not equal to crackdown. Jailed journalists
are mainly Kurds, and the rest accused of coup plotting; the real consequences
of his "long shadow" are felt on media outlets through volunteering media
owners acting as lackeys/sycophants day by day imposing censorship in the
newsrooms. So what the Turkish journalist (as opposed to the Kurdish one) today
fears is not jail, but being unemployed.

Some examples of this were seen in cases where a popular
columnist or a TV anchor suddenly, with no apparent reason, was told to go.

The problem is there is no voice that stands up to the PM, to
make sense, that it is self-destructive to try to create a monolithic press
landscape in a country where a tradition of diversity and pluralism and
competition is far too strong; fear of jail is far too little.

No government in Turkey could control a media with 40 daily
national newspapers, 250-plus private TV channels, 1,300 radio stations, and Internet
where at least 11 news portals are operative.

In conclusion, there is no crackdown on the media here, but
growing control, decreasing (if any left) editorial independence in the center,
and a climate of self-censorship not imposed by the political power but by the
economic power (owners) who act in their own financial interests.

The worst and critical part is that, at the moment, there is no
media owner in the "center" who cares or stands up for the decent conduct of
the profession. Not long ago, lashing out at some columnists, the PM addressed
the media owners as "shopkeepers." Not a single word of protest came from those
humiliated; yet abroad they were very keen on repeating that "media freedom in
Turkey is in danger." Instead, they hire and fire people, with attention to the
"sensitivities in Ankara." (None of the media outlets allow trade union
activities in their territory.)

NO: Turkey's press is
quite partisan. Why is that? Where does this partisan nature come from? Could
you give a little context to that?

YB: It is true. You could say the press was, for
decades, under the spell of Kemalism, the official ideology, rather than
Journalism. This was comparable--to an extent--to Soviet press practices.
Although the climate changed after World War II, as Turkey entered NATO and
applied pluralism, Kemalism remained an internalized guide in journalism. It
respected all its taboos, acted as parrots in nationally sensitive issues, and
remained as an extended part of the regime based on a military-led tutelage.

This also meant that as much as it glorified the military, it
was as cynical and disrespectful of democratic mechanisms, free vote, etc. Overall,
it backed all the undemocratic moves by the army, coups, or undue interventions
into civilian politics. The state traditionally penetrated into the newsrooms,
with people linked with secret services, and there are very strong rumors that
some key opinion writers were even on the state's payroll.

Kemalism is still internalized in the center, Atatürk remaining
a taboo. Even the Islamist/post-Islamist press has Kemalist features, as it
publishes front pages full of Soviet-style pictures and clichés on national
holidays and commemorations year after year.

Yet partisanship has other faces, too: There is a strong press
tradition in the left and in the conservative right. This has played out to the
extreme when the AKP unleashed a reform process, which meant breaking one taboo
after another, and the Kemalist core of the press is now in either retreat or
dissolution.

This has been very painful. Also, the cases of journalists
jailed in the Ergenekon type of contexts are interesting, because they showed
through evidence presented to courts (such as genuine diaries, etc.) how far
some people in the Turkish media could go to battle a party they did not
like.

NO: How long can media
diversity and vibrancy last if the pressure on the media in Turkey continues
with its current pace?

YB: This is a very important question. The future
of independent, efficient, strong press for Turkey looks bleak at the moment.
The gloom has some reasons: The continuation of AKP (which has done,
doubtlessly, a lot of good things for keeping Turkish perestroika alive) as a
single, massive, unchallenged force leads to a media that is forced to
increasing submission because of the lack of a strong main opposition. The CHP,
in main opposition, cares even less about media freedom and free speech than the
AKP, which poisons the climate.

Then the worrisome pattern goes on: While the rules of the game
in the media landscape remain unchanged, unreformed, what changes are the
actors, new proprietors. Turkey's media owners are--like drug addicts--dependent
on the powers in Ankara because they are in all sorts of businesses, need
approvals for growth and investments, etc., and therefore keep their media
outlets either as weapons for extortion or, at best, at the service of
governments.

For any progress, we need steps in several dimensions:

Around
40 articles in various laws (Anti-Terror Law, Internet Law, the Penal Code,
Radio-TV Law, and Press Law) must be amended in favor of freedoms.

New
rules on limitations of media ownership must be brought in.

Media
owners who are in other businesses than publishing must be banned from entering
public tenders.

Cross-ownership
must be severely restricted or banned.

New
Trade Union Law must be passed to enhance job security (thus editorial
independence) in the media.

The
public broadcaster, TRT, still goes on in Cold War style, strictly controlled
by the government. It must be reformed to be given autonomy or independence.

Media
proprietors must be made aware of the specific nature and social role of
journalism, and act as bravely as their employees.

NO: The Turkish
authorities have recently proposed amendments to legislation that affect the
press, including amendments to Turkey's anti-terror and criminal laws. But many
domestic and international critics consider those amendments only cosmetic. How
do you assess the amendments? What has prompted the government to propose them?

YB: We still have not seen any progress on the
issue. It will remain to be seen whether the so-called Fourth Package will ease
the tensions. I remain skeptical until it happens. Until it happens, we will be
operating in a suffocating atmosphere. In conclusion, let me say this: The
outside observers tend to make believe that this is all about jailed
journalists. While the urgency and priority of the issue is clear, no one
should ever believe that once all of them are released, Turkey's media freedom
issues will be resolved. No. They will all remain, in effect, as threatened and
frustrated as they are.

Nina Ognianova is coordinator of CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program. A native of Bulgaria, Ognianova has led CPJ advocacy missions to Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

Comments

Yavuz Baydar's implication that Turkey's leading investigative reporters in the Oda TV case including Ahmet Şik and Nedim Şener (an İPİ World Press Freedom Hero) were coup conspirators and so justfiablly arrested and held in prison for a long time , is not only false and insulting, but also downright cruel. Many scientific reports have stated that even the scant evidence being used against them was fabricated. Mr. Baydar knows all this. Obviously he has an ax tto grind.

You should have informed your readers that Mr. Baydar works for a newspaper whose CEO is none other than the son-in-law of the Prime Minister.

The Yavuz Baydar interview is let alone being “illuminating,” it is utterly disconcerting about the state of press freedom in Turkey. Speaking of allegedly co-conspiring journalists he declared that “the accusations are so substantiated that almost all the applications of the suspected colleagues, claiming that they were indicted and jailed because they are journalists, were rejected by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).” This is a gross distortion of the fact. The applications were made on grounds of lengthy detention periods and were rejected because the cases were pending the final ruling. Baydar fails to mention that what he describes as “substantial evidence” consists of digital files planted in the computers of the defendants through viruses and that this fact has been corroborated by several scientific reports. The defendants claim that these files were planted by police which is controlled by the government. Furthermore, all the incarcerated journalists were interrogated not about what kind of weapons they had, or when they were planning to overthrow the government, but solely about their journalistic activities, their sources and why they published this article or that. “The practice of journalism itself is being tried. Irrespective of the lie that it was not the practices of journalism that were under investigation, in many of these cases, as in my own, judges and prosecutors asked my colleagues and I questions about the very essence of our professional activities and our sources of information,” this is how Ahmet Sik described the situation addressing the European Parliament shortly after he was released from prison indicted in the Odatv case. It would be more “illuminating” for the readers of CPJ if a more objective colleague were interviewed instead of one who is the ombudsman of a newspaper owned by the Prime Minister’s son-in-law.

Shame Professor for the TWO typos, but we did that one on Twitter, didn't we? So let's get down to brass tacks here, rather than umpteen tweets. First of all, if you're a journalist, let alone a "professor" of the trade (whatever that is), your spelling is your window display on your profession. If you can't get that right, how can any reader trust the rest of what you're trying to say. But okay, I got it. English isn't your strong point: you confuse "culprit" with "defendant" (as you did on Twitter, about this article above). A defendant is innocent till proven guilty, the word you needed regarding Ahmet Şık & Nedim Şener. However, referring to them as culprits, which means they're guilty, puts you on the same side of the fence that you oppose.

As for scoring cheap points, what else is yours and Niyazi Dalyanci's point about Baydar being an employee of the the PM's son-in-law? If anything, it's the same old factionalism that Turkish politics AND journalism is rife with. Not that Baydar is beyond reproach. I've read errors in his work, but not here. If either of you had read AND understood the above (tough one Prof, as it's in English), then by the same token, Baydar should be out of a job. To wit:

"In conclusion, there is no crackdown on the media here, but growing control, decreasing (if any left) editorial independence in the center, and a climate of self-censorship not imposed by the political power but by the economic power (owners) who act in their own financial interests.

The worst and critical part is that, at the moment, there is no media owner in the "center" who cares or stands up for the decent conduct of the profession. Not long ago, lashing out at some columnists, the PM addressed the media owners as "shopkeepers." Not a single word of protest came from those humiliated; yet abroad they were very keen on repeating that "media freedom in Turkey is in danger." Instead, they hire and fire people, with attention to the "sensitivities in Ankara." (None of the media outlets allow trade union activities in their territory.)"

...Which also applies to the Sabah newspaper, a major "center" daily of which said son-in-law is the CEO, and who were no doubt present when they offered up their "censor commission" to their beloved PM. The reason why Baydar's job isn't at risk is probably because Çalık Holding, the owners of Sabah and whose CEO is Berat Albayrak (Erdoğan's son-in-law), isn't about to lose any contracts by the very cosy nature of their relationship with the government.

And that, my friends, is the real problem with Turkish journalism. Too few journalists in this country are brave enough to report on the real issues affecting the country, and instead conflate and blur the lines between fact and propaganda. And too few newspaper proprietors are willing to defend their journalists when they do actually report on what matters, like the Kurdish issue or corruption in the business world.